EVERY WEEK, I have every intention of writing a shorter, more concise TCW week in review; and every week, I get carried away and fail. However, an email from a (sadly now former) reader, which told of how all the articles on the site were too long, too depressing and had just got too much for her, has concentrated my resolve.
Though I can’t promise much on the ‘depressing’ front, I will cut to the chase on the incredibly important lecture I went to last week at the House of Commons’ Portcullis House. It was on Labour’s big defence sellout to the EU, right under our noses, seemingly without any awareness or opposition. But for this wake-up call presentation by Lt Gen Jonathon Riley (the distinguished soldier, military historian and defence analyst whom we have the good fortune to have writing for us), I for one would still be in the dark about what Starmer is up to and its significance for our sovereignty.
It was my first foray into Portcullis House, Parliament’s office block annex, since Labour took office. Looking through into the ground floor atrium, I was struck by just how scruffy the inmates have got: poorly groomed Labour MPs and their even scruffier spads, I assume. It was hard to spot a suit; hardly a sight to command any foreign politician or visitor’s respect, I thought. Upstairs along the committee room corridor, some suits did indeed come into view, those of mainly Conservative Peers and MPs waiting for the doors to the committee room open.
As I was to find out, their attire was deceptive. It did not clothe sagacity nor an urgency commensurate with Jonathon Riley’s wake-up call.
Their lack of response to Riley’s dissection of Starmer’s democracy-denying pact with Brussels on foreign affairs, defence and the defence industry that he plans to have signed and sealed before the end of the year, was shocking. A pact which, Jonathon said, is ‘a mechanism to make the UK subject to the orders of the EU Commission on foreign affairs and defence policy [and] as far as the EU is concerned, a carbon copy of that proposed by Theresa May in 2018-2019’. We would no longer be in control of our defence industry or investment.
Such a sellout was the part of May’s withdrawal agreement that the Lt Gen and others led the resistance to in 2019 and succeeded in getting Johnson to drop (the one decent thing he did). Now, this replay (which is worse for a variety of reasons) will make us a non-voting, but subordinate, participant in a giant new EU defence architecture. Back to the future, destination pre-Brexit. This is Starmer’s reset with the EU, the surrender of our sovereignty. Without an army, you cannot call yourself a nation. If the EU goes to war with Russia, so do we. Not even a vote.
Bar one or two responses, the Lt Gen’s wake-up call catalysed little concern. Nor, depressingly, did there seem much appreciation of a detailed and dedicated research and analysis that rightly should have been the urgent task of the Commons Defence Select Committee. It was a tour de force, but this is the Westminster bubble. I was right there in it, I realised ruefully. Why expect anything but defeatism or disinterest from ‘Conservatives’ who unquestioningly signed up to the Climate Change Act, to Covid scaremongering, compliantly accepted Lockdown, and now faced with this real threat to the nation – Starmer’s sell out to the EU – all but said ‘nothing to see here’. One even suggested the Lt Gen’s ‘alarmism’ was not the best way to proceed. The ‘polite’ cop out on all issues of real principle.
You will be the judge when we publish in the coming days two articles the Lt Gen is writing for us, based on his slides and speech. Oh, and by the way, who do you think he told us is in charge of Starmer’s surrender squad? None other than our old friend (now Sir) Ollie Robbins. That unelected and unaccountable civil servant May had running her Brexit team. Talk about a deep state.
I was still fuming (yes it annoyed me) when I arrived at the farewell party at Brooks’s Club in St James for another man infinitely superior to his pliable peergroup. Yes, it was quite a day out for me. Finding myself amongst old allies, I knocked back a couple of glasses of white wine to calm myself down – that’s my excuse, anyway! And no, none of them had been aware of Starmer’s sellout to the EU any more than I had. Where has Reform UK been on this?
Onto Dr Benny Peiser. It was his ‘do’. For those of you who don’t know, he was appointed by Lord Lawson to run the Global Warming Policy Foundation when he set it up in November 2009 and has done so since, turning it into the most potent academic policy force in this country and arguably around the world against climate insanity.
In a decent ‘polity’, he should have been saying goodbye with the reward of a gong for his heroic work. He has fought the Establishment narrative with science and sense unwaveringly over the years, drawing together distinguished (sceptical) academics from the fields of physics, chemistry, engineering and more; questioning, commissioning and publishing their critiques of the received religion of man-made climate change and the Net-Zero energy revolution that the ideologues believe can halt it. Always against the zeitgeist. It’s not easy; there are no rewards.
A brave and modest man who’s retained his calm and commitment to scientific rationality in the face of deplatforming, defamation, cancellation and even physical attack of GWPF premises. If there is greater awareness today of the climate cult’s irrationality, it is much down to this man and his quiet, measured but persistent challenge to it. His ‘retirement’ fortunately does not mean he’s retired from the fray; any more than the courageous and equally modest Lt Gen Riley has.
With men like these still around – men with brains, principles and moral courage – there’s still hope.
